Octavia's War

by Beryl Kingston

  It pleased her to see that her pupils were being as sensible as she was.

  The fifth form sent a deputation to her before assembly to ask what they were to do if the sirens sounded while they were taking their examination.

  ‘It’s all in hand,’ she told them. ‘You will go down to the east cloakroom, and finish them there. I will tell you all about it at assembly. But I shouldn’t think we’d have any more today. Three’s enough.’

  ‘Did you hear the doodlebugs this morning, Miss Smith?’ one of the first-formers said cheerfully, as she walked along the corridor on her way to her first lesson.

  ‘Yes, Connie,’ Octavia said. ‘I most certainly did. We could hardly be off hearing them, could we? Nasty, noisy things.’ And she noted that the pilotless planes had acquired a nickname and thought it was rather a good one.

  The morning continued without any more alarms, which was quite a relief, and at break, the girls went out into the grounds as if it was an ordinary day. Octavia was watching them from the window of her study, when Barbara Trench arrived to say that she’d got something to tell her.

  ‘I’m taking my children back to Woking,’ she said. ‘I can’t put them at risk, even if I were prepared to stay here myself. I’ve written to our landlady and she’s quite happy to have us back. I’m sorry to do this to you, Miss Smith, but I’m sure you understand my position.’

  Octavia understood it perfectly but it was an annoyance just the same.

  ‘We shall have to put an advertisement in The Times as quickly as we can,’ she said to Maggie, ‘or we shall be a teacher short come September and I can’t have that.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Maggie said. ‘I’ll do it straight away.’

  All in all, it was an eventful day.

  But there was a worse one just over a week before the end of term. The examinations were over and the fifth- and sixth-formers were rehearsing a play to lighten the last assembly. When the sirens went they were all in the gym and half of them were in costume.

  ‘Never mind changing,’ Joan Marshall told them, appearing in the doorway in her sports kit with a rounders bat in her hand. ‘Just get into the cloakrooms as soon as you can. Leave everything where it is. We’ll clear up afterwards.’

  ‘It’ll spoil the surprise,’ they grumbled. But they did as they were told. Which was just as well, for the doodlebug fell seconds after they were all underground and it was so close they could feel the floor rippling under their feet from the shock wave it caused. Then the lights went out and there was a stunned pause while they heard the patter of shattering glass. Then there was a dull roar from somewhere in the building.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Octavia called, striding through the dark. ‘You’re quite safe here. The lights will come on again presently.’

  There was the flicker of a very small light and Joan Marshall was walking towards them with a candle in a saucer. ‘Best I can do for the moment,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Has anyone got a torch?’ A surprising number of torches were produced and Jenny Jones organised a sing-song to entertain them while they were waiting and after what seemed like a very long time the all clear sounded.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Octavia said for the second time, ‘and don’t worry. Miss Gordon and I will just go up and take a look round and see where the damage is and then we’ll come down and tell you when it’s safe for you to go. We’ll be as quick as we can.’

  They toured the entire building, walking quickly from room to room and Octavia took notes in her pocket notebook as she went. There was dust everywhere. The floors were thick with it and it was still swirling visibly in the air. All the windows at the east end of the school were shattered and quite a lot of glass had fallen into the classrooms despite the sticky tape; the east door had been blown off its hinges and leant against the jamb at a crazy angle like a drunk about to fall over; and when they reached the music room, they found that the ceiling had fallen and now lay in pieces all over the floor and the piano. There was an air-raid warden standing in the mess, making notes.

  ‘Any casualties?’ he asked. ‘I gather you were in the shelters.’

  ‘We were,’ Octavia told him, ‘and nobody’s hurt but I shall have to send them home, don’t you think?’

  The warden agreed with her. ‘It’s not safe enough to keep them here at the moment,’ he said. ‘You don’t want another ceiling falling on them.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Octavia said, glad that the decision was made. And she turned to Morag. ‘I shall write to their parents and keep them informed,’ she said. ‘I wonder whether the phones are still on.’

  It took over an hour for the staff to shepherd all their pupils out of the building and for Octavia and Maggie to write and print the letter. By the time it was finished, Octavia was tired to her bones. When Maggie left her to see if she could make a cup of tea, she sat at her dusty desk and put her head in her hands, aching to lie down and have the day over and done with. I put them through this, she thought. It was my decision to stay and if that damned bomb had fallen just a little bit closer, they could all have been killed. She was torn with shame and fear and dragged down by the weight of her responsibility.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Maggie said, returning with the tray.

  The question was so concerned and affectionate it nearly brought Octavia to tears. But she managed to control herself with what was left of her energy. ‘Just tired,’ she said. ‘I shall be glad to see the back of this term.’

  ‘It’s been a day and a half,’ Maggie sympathised. ‘Nice cup of tea, eh?’ But as she was pouring she suddenly stopped and put down the teapot and grinned. ‘What an idiot I am!’ she said. ‘I had a treat for you. Came just before the alarm went. Fancy me forgetting.’

  ‘A treat?’ Octavia asked.

  ‘Another application for the English job,’ Maggie said, grinning more widely than ever. ‘It’s on top of the pile.’

  It was from Lizzie. Octavia could feel her spirits rising at the sight of it.

  ‘I recognised her writing,’ Maggie said. ‘I knew you’d be pleased. Our Lizzie Meriton. She’d fit us like a glove.’

  ‘We shall have to interview all the suitable candidates,’ Octavia said. ‘It mustn’t be a foregone conclusion. That wouldn’t be proper.’

  But it was and they both knew it.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  ‘There you are, Edie,’ Dora said, spreading a newspaper out on her kitchen table. ‘This is for you.’

  It was a warm afternoon at the start of September and the sisters were making the most of it. In four days’ time the new term would begin and then there would be no more gettogethers until half term.

  ‘What is it?’ Edith said, easing Joan out of her coat.

  ‘Prefabricated house,’ Dora said, taking the coat and hanging it on a hook on the door. ‘Read it. I’ll just make the tea, you four, and then we can have some cake.’

  The table was set for six with a home-made apple cake on its stand as a centrepiece and Joan had been eyeing it ever since she came in.

  ‘They’re building them on the commons,’ Dora said, wetting the pot, ‘and they’re going to give priority to people who’ve been bombed out or are married to servicemen. That’s you on both counts. Read it.’

  Edith sat at the table and read the article. ‘They look smashing,’ she said, examining the picture.

  ‘They’re putting them up on Clapham Common already,’ Dora said. ‘I saw them this morning with a great queue of people standing outside and I wondered what they were and then I bought the paper and lo and behold there they were. What say we go and have a look?’

  ‘Will they let us?’ Edith said. ‘I mean, are they ready for people to look at?’

  ‘I’ll bet that’s what the queue was,’ Dora said. ‘People looking. Anyway it’s worth a try. What d’you think, kids?’

  ‘I thought we were going to the pictures,’ David said, scowling.

  ‘We shan’t if you pull that face,’ his mother warned.
‘It’ll all depend how you behave.’

  ‘We’re having our cake first though, aren’t we?’ Joan asked.

  Half an hour later, thirsts slaked and cake replete, they walked down the High Street to the common to take a look at the new houses. After the shabby appearance of their battered High Street with its bomb sites and its grime and its worn-out paintwork, they looked fresh and band-box new, standing in neat rows beside the trees. Edith said it took her breath away just to look at them. Everything about them was appealing, from the smart green paint on their front doors and their two front windows, to the neat grey panels of their walls. They had flat roofs and tin chimneys and there were little white picket fences round the patches of grass that had been allocated to them as their front gardens.

  ‘They’re like country cottages,’ Edith said.

  They had to stand in line for a long time before they were allowed inside but, even though the girls were fidgety and David scowled and grumbled, it was well worth the wait, because if the outside was good, the inside was spectacular. There were three big bedrooms, with wardrobes and cupboards all built in, and a lovely bathroom and a living room with a lot more cupboards and a little table you could fold down and set against the wall to make more space when you weren’t using it – and, wonder of wonders, a gas fire. ‘Think of that,’ Edith said. ‘No more raking out the ashes and dragging coal up from the cellar and having to wait for it to warm through. The luxury of it.’ But the kitchen was the best of all. It had everything that anyone could possibly want – a little white geyser so that you could have hot water whenever you needed it instead of having to wait for the kettle to boil, a copper for the washing and a lovely new gas cooker all grey and white and ready to use, and shelves and cupboards all built in like the ones in the bedrooms and, standing alongside them and looking like another white cupboard until you opened it, one of those new refrigerators with shelves for butter and milk and meat and little round spaces where you could put your eggs. It was like being at the pictures.

  ‘If this is what the future’s going to be like,’ Edith said, ‘I’m all for it.’

  The lady who’d been showing them round gave her a smile. ‘Then perhaps you’d better step next door and put your name down,’ she said. ‘There’s a lady there who will take your particulars.’

  ‘There you are,’ Dora said, when the forms had been filled in and they were walking back along Balham High Street towards the cinema, ‘won’t that be something to tell your Arthur. Cheer him up no end this will.’

  ‘He needs cheering,’ Edith said. ‘They’ve moved them to another camp.’

  ‘Again?’ Dora said. ‘How many times’s that?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘They’re getting edgy, that’s what it is,’ Dora said sagely. ‘They know their number’s up. That’s why they keep on bombing us. They’re doing it while they can.’

  Talk of bombing reminded Edith of her brother-in-law. ‘How’s your John?’ she said.

  ‘He was all right last time I heard,’ Dora said. ‘Still cracking jokes. You know John. He’d make a joke of anything. He says he’s doing the same job he was doing in Portsmouth and getting bombed for it in the same way. It sounds as if they’re being plastered. Damned doodlebugs.’

  ‘Sometimes I think the whole world’s gone raving mad,’ Edith said sadly. ‘Here’s our Johnnie in Canada with one leg, and Ma having hysterics, and your John being bombed by doodlebugs and us being bombed by doodlebugs, and my Arthur pining away in a prisoner a’ war camp and I’ve been looking at new houses.’

  ‘And why not?’ Dora said fiercely. ‘You take what’s on offer, gel, that’s my advice. Live while you can. You never know what’s round the corner. And keep your old chin up. It can’t go on forever.’ Then she turned her attention to the children because they’d reached the cinema. And not before time. She couldn’t have her Edie getting down. ‘Here we are kids,’ she said. ‘Now it’s your treat because you’ve been good. And afterwards we’ll have fish and chips for supper. How about that?’

  Despite the doodlebugs and the paucity of the rations there was quite a lot of optimism that autumn, for the European campaigns were going well. The Russians had captured Bucharest and reached the borders of East Prussia, the Americans were in Paris, the Allied armies in Italy had taken Florence and Montgomery’s men were storming across Belgium, going at such a speed that Ben reported to Lizzie, We ran right into the back of their retreat, fought them wheel to wheel. Bit bloody but we gave them a good trouncing. I took a slight flesh wound. Nothing to worry about.

  She did worry about it, naturally. A tank battle fought wheel to wheel sounded absolutely terrifying but it was over by the time she was reading the letter and there was no point in thinking about it. So she wrote back to tell him she’d got a job at Roehampton with Smithie, that she was living with her father for the time being and that she was starting work in two days’ time. I shall be a school teacher by the time you get this, she wrote. Then she put down her pen and pondered.

  There was so much she wanted to tell him, so much she needed to tell him if she was absolutely honest. She’d sent off her application for this job almost on impulse, thinking how wonderful it would be to be teaching at her old school, and when she’d been interviewed and appointed she’d been so happy and excited she hadn’t thought about anything else, but now, as the beginning of the new term drew near and inescapable, she was having troubling second thoughts. What if she couldn’t teach after all? What if she got things wrong? If only he were here beside her and they could talk about it. But they couldn’t and it wasn’t fair to burden him with her problems when he’d got more than enough of his own. Sighing, she picked up her pen again and wrote PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. Because that was the important thing, not whether she could teach or not.

  Tommy was rather pleased to have his little girl back home with him although he warned her on their first evening together that they wouldn’t see much of one another.

  ‘It’s mayhem at the Foreign Office with all this going on,’ he said. ‘We work all the hours God sends. There’s a plan afoot to start up a new League of Nations and Tubby and I are in the thick of it. I shall have to go to Washington in a week or two.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told him. ‘It’s only for a little while. Just till I find my feet.’

  ‘Mrs Dunnaway will look after you when I’m not here,’ he told her. ‘And at least we shan’t have so many buzz bombs to worry about.’

  ‘Really?’ she asked.

  ‘Should be, now we’re in the Pas de Calais,’ he told her.

  ‘How much longer is this war going on, Pa?’ she asked.

  ‘Six months, nine, a year at the most,’ he said. ‘We’re planning the peace already. That’s what all these meetings are about. Cheer up, little one. He’ll soon be home. Good times are coming.’

  That was Octavia’s theme at her first assembly of the year.

  ‘We are starting a new school year in our own school building for the first time in six years,’ she said. ‘We have more pupils than we have ever had in our history and I think it is safe to say that this will be the last year of the war. Work hard, work well and, above all, enjoy what you do. The peace is coming and when it does there will be a great deal to do and we shall need all our skills if we are to do it well. We none of us know what lies ahead of us nor what challenges we shall have to face. But whatever happens I know you will rise to the challenge as Roehampton girls have done all through this long terrible war. I am very proud of you.

  ‘Now we will start our new year in our usual way with our usual hymn, “Lord behold us with Thy blessing”. If you please, Miss Jones.’

  Iris Forbes and Sarah Turnbridge had just received their black gowns as senior prefects and were sitting on the platform behind Miss Smith with a good view of the assembled staff, who were ranged on either side of the hall in their usual places.

  ‘It is her,’ Iris said, as they walked back to their form rooms. ‘I kne
w it was.’

  ‘I wonder whether she’ll teach us,’ Sarah said. Both of them were taking English at Higher Schools so it was possible.

  ‘We shall have our timetables presently,’ Iris said, ‘and then we’ll know.’

  ‘Just so long as it isn’t old mother Trench,’ Sarah said.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Iris told her. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Good riddance,’ Sarah said. ‘She was the most boring teacher I’ve ever had.’

  They turned up for their first lesson with Mrs Hardy at the end of the afternoon, seven young women in red sashes and black gowns, grinning like Cheshire cats. They were so excited to see her they didn’t notice how nervous she was. She’d spent the morning with her form giving out timetables and plans of the school and telling them how the Dalton System worked and now she was feeling unaccountably tired and not at all sure how she was going to tackle this first lesson. It was all very well thinking you could do a thing but quite different when you actually had to do it.

  ‘Fancy it being you,’ Iris said, as they found their seats. ‘We knew it was you the minute we saw you, didn’t we, Sarah.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie said. ‘Now we’re going to…’

  ‘The last time we were all in that hall together was the day we were evacuated,’ Sarah said. ‘We never thought the next time we’d be in the sixth form and you’d be our teacher.’

  ‘What a day that was,’ their friend Margaret said. ‘Do you remember how hot it was? Stifling. And we all had our winter uniforms on.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lizzie tried again. ‘We’re going to…’

  But now they’d begun to reminisce, there was no way she could stop them. They were remembering the day detail by detail.